Although advertisements on the web pages may degrade your experience, our business certainly depends on them and we can only keep providing you high-quality research based articles as long as we can display ads on our pages.

To view this article, you can disable your ad blocker and refresh this page or simply login.

If you’re trying to start an Etsy shop and you want to know how to not be terrible at it, you should definitely keep reading this list of the 10 least successful Etsy shops and why they are failing.

Selling stuff online is kind of hard. It requires work and some amount of business savvy I’d imagine. I don’t have that kind of patience or skill. I’m sure my shop would be on this list you’re about to read, to be honest. I’m also not that crafty, but that’s beside the point. I can’t imagine trying to sustain a successful Etsy shop and I’m proud of every single person that’s been able to.

Onypix/Shutterstock.com

Etsy made its online debut 11 years ago and has attracted a lot of successful sellers. It has about 1.7 million active sellers and 27.1 million active buyers. Like all other businesses, some have hit the jackpot and some have hit rock bottom. There are two sides of this, though. Etsy has a niche of items that tend to do really well, as shown on our list of the 10 Best Things To Sell On Etsy To Make Money, while other shops just tend to not do as well for not selling just the right type of item. There are a wide variety of reasons for this, like shortcomings in SEO, marketing, and even pictures you post. Sometimes online selling just takes luck.

Failing at Etsy doesn’t mean you’re not good at online selling in general since Etsy isn’t the only online marketplace. This article simply lists some specific Etsy mistakes and shortcomings that can guide you in a better direction. Because it’s hard to find specific shop names that have failed because of lack of information (people tend to not promote bad shops), we decided instead to search for the types of shops that are least successful. The data was sourced from Etsy’s Forum and Discussion page and Etsy’s Seller Handbook.